i am your neighborhttp://iamyourneighbor.com
Your neighbor isn't the one you live next to, but the one you are next to.Tue, 23 Sep 2014 01:45:22 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1Walterhttp://iamyourneighbor.com/walter/
http://iamyourneighbor.com/walter/#commentsMon, 22 Sep 2014 22:01:43 +0000maxhttp://iamyourneighbor.com/?p=273downtown los angeles

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Walter said, setting my camera on the counter. I’d come barreling in through the front door of his repair shop after three failed attempts at opening the thing before realizing Walter had a timed lock on his door, and buzzed his customers in personally after ensuring they were not packing heat or sporting a balaclava.

I had neither. Walter unlocked the door. I’d been in refrigerators with more room than Walter’s Camera and Digital Repair. I bumped shoulders with the Koreans – the only other customers in there – in my attempt to successfully approach the counter. The gentleman I presumed to be Walter asked me what I wanted. He was a short man with no hair and a protruding belly that made me feel further from him than I really was. He kept one too many buttons undone on his shirt, and I couldn’t tell if this was due to the heat or his stomach. In direct contradiction to my loud and loquacious nature, he spoke quietly and carefully as if each word might be his last.

I showed him my camera. “We took this to the desert,” I said. “It’s been beat up a bit. I think the censor might be dirty. Can you clean it?”

Walter nodded, took my camera, and asked if I had change in the meter.

“Oh, I can’t stay. Can I pick it up tomorrow?”

“No. Sit.”

“Sit? But I…”

“Sit.”

I sat.

The Koreans and I exchanged smiles but nothing else. They appeared to remain amused by my inability to get through the front door. I crossed my legs to make room for the three of us.

Walter’s Camera and Digital Repair felt more like a mechanic’s garage, or worse, the kind of place where a couple of goons might rough up some lowlifes with bad gambling debts. I studied the stacks of nonmoving parts distributed unevenly about the perimeter of the already dwindling space. Box fans hung haphazardly from the ceiling with shoelace. I dug my heel into a hole in the brown carpet beneath my chair.

Walter reappeared then with the Korean’s camera, sending them on their way. He turned to me and that’s when he said it. “I have good news and bad news.”

“Do I have to pick?”

“Yes,” he said, so I said, “Give me the bad news.”

“The bad news is I cannot take your money.”

He didn’t smile. He had no tell. Was this a joke? I couldn’t be certain, so I did the only thing I could think to do: I assumed the worst.

I cannot take your money, but it will COST YOU YOUR LIFE.

I cannot take your money because YOU HAVE NONE.

I cannot take your money because YOUR CAMERA IS BEYOND REPAIR.

“What? Why?”

“Camera is in perfect condition.”

“But … that’s not bad news. That’s great news.”

“Bad news for me. If nothing wrong with camera, I cannot take money. Honesty is best policy, yes?”

I held out my hand for him to shake. “Walter, thank you so much. You’re a good man.”

He doesn’t shake. Instead he asks, “Why you have Tamron lens? If your camera have problems, it’s because you have Tamron lenses.”

“What’s wrong with Tamron?”

“They not Canon.”

“I see.”

“Buy new lens.”

“Do you sell them?”

“No. I just fix camera. I do not sell. Can you afford new lens? How you make living?”

“I, uh, I’m an editor.”

“A what?”

“Editor. I edit video. And sometimes I write.”

“Oh. Writer. I used to be a writer.”

“You did? What did you write?”

“Two movie.”

“You wrote two movies?”

He shrugs. “I was ghost writer in Egypt.” No big deal.

I think about every twenty-soemthing in LA filling every seat in every coffee shop from downtown to Santa Monica, hoping for half the chance Walter’s had and he’s now fixing cameras in a room with box fans dangling for dear life from the ceiling.

“Is that where you’re from?” I ask. “Egypt?”

“Yes.”

“When did you move here to LA?”

“1968. This is a good country, no? You should be proud to be here. Other countries very corrupt. America only little corrupt.” He laughed but did not smile. I wondered if it was an acquired skill or something you’re born with.

“Why did you stop writing?”

“My boss was bad man. People around him went to jail. I stop writing to avoid jail. Go to college. Receive my Bachelors of Business and Science.”

“So why go from writing screenplays to fixing cameras?”

“Opportunity for monopoly,” he said. “No one in Egypt fix cameras. Just two other men.”

“And you were the third?”

“Yes. But not for long. Soon I was number one.”

He finally smiled.

“And then you came here?” I asked.

“For better life. I fix cameras ever since.”

“Well thank you for doing what you do, Walter… You are Walter, I assume, right?”

Sayad shakes his head. “No, he told me I was Walter. Just as you did.”

“Why didn’t you correct him?”

Sayad shrugged again. “Walter is on the sign. Good for business if people think I am Walter. Bad for business if they think Walter is dead.”

I can’t argue with that. “Well, I am sorry for calling you Walter.”

“He was Jew, you know.”

I cringe. Oh no. “Who? The real Walter? My meter has probably expired by now. I should go.”

“Yes. He was Jew and I am Arab.” Sayad pokes his own exposed chest (with surprisingly little chest hair for a man of his age, I might add). He looks away from me, at everything, at nothing. “We were friends. All peace all the time. No politics. Just love. What do you think of that?”

“I think I like that very much, Sayad.”

“Me too, Max. You’re a kind man. Tell your girlfriend that Sayad said so when you get home.”

I collected the camera from him and placed it in my bag.

“Don’t set lens like that.” Sayad said.

“What do you mean?”

“Bad for camera to keep lens there.” Sayad handed me a plastic bag and told me to put my 50mm lens in there instead of next to the camera. “You must protect it. Bad for camera to leave lens unprotected.”

I’ve seen this man before. I’ve given him Gatorade, turkey sandwiches, spare change. I’ve also ignored him, looked away, crossed the street, or pretended to be speaking to my wife when he’s held out his grande Starbucks cup with the chewed rim, emptied of coffee and now filled with dollar bills or loose quarters.

“It is,” I say. I lift the pet carrier to eye level so he can see the tiny, snow-shoe, Siamese kitten inside. He squints, holds up an index finger and pets the air, smiles. He’s missing all but four teeth on the bottom row so what he says next I can’t understand.

“Excuse me?” I lower the pet carrier.

“Did. You. Rescue. Her?” He enunciates like a man who’s used to being asked, “Excuse me?”

“I did. Just a few weeks back.”

“I had a cat once. He had SIX. TOES.”

“Six toes? That’s rare.”

“That cat lady down the street…” he points to where I just came from. “She gave my cat shots once.”

I point to the kitten I am holding. “This little one just got shots from her.”

He tells me her name was Jacklyn and that, “It’s a story. But it’s too long to tell.” He says, “How old do you thinks I am?”

I’m careful here. “Forty?”

“Come on. I am sixty-three.”

“Sixty-three!? Well, you look good.”

“Yeah. Right. I’m homeless now cause I been payin’ for bills since she di-ed.”

I ask how long it’s been since his wife’s passing.

He interupts and shouts, “DI-ED,” thinking I was about to ask him to repeat himself again. When he realizes what I actually asked, he says, “It’s been a year. A year ago this month.”

I’m thinking, This story is almost too sad to be true, and Valentino takes my hand in his. He says, “But God gives me strength through people. People like you. I’m all right.” He lets go.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you and your wife live out here in Hollywood?”

“You know somethin’ man, we lived everywhere.”

“You lived everywhere? What was your favorite place?”

“My favorite place? Right here in LA.”

I ask how long he’s been here.

He laughs. “Since before yous was born.” His red and swollen gums are on full display. “I ain’t tryin’ to be funny! You just questionable. Askin’ a lot.” He reaches into his jacket, removes a half-smoked cigarette. He places the smoke between his lips, but doesn’t light it. “I been here since I was three. Came from Texas.”

“Texas. I’ve been to Texas. It’s way better out here than it is in Texas, huh?”

“Too much bigo-try. I was next door to Louisian-a. Thirteen-years-old I was in the Martin Luther King March.” Valentino removes the glove from his right hand, slips it in his pocket for a lighter. His palm and fingers are wrapped in dirty brown bandages.

“What happened to your hand?”

“Oh, yeah. I had to use it.”

“On what?”

“On somebody else. When you’re out here on the curb, sleeping on the curb, like I’m out here on the curb, you know. Be strong or be a coward. You got to do what you got to do.”

“Is your hand okay now?”

“Oh yeah. I’m ’bout ready to take them bandages off. I’m just out here now tryin’ to get a room and wash my ass.” He holds up the Starbucks cup and makes sure we can both hear the change inside. “You don’t know nothin’ ’bout the streets. You have any idea? No, you ain’t got no idea. You know how hard it is for me to just wash my hands?” Valentino shakes his head, looks down at the sidewalk, tries to light the cigarette, but the wind won’t allow it.

“You need soap?”

He looks up from the task at hand. “Oh. Man. I could use soap. You have some soap?”

“I don’t have any soap, but I can go get you some.”

“Oh. No. You don’t have to do that.” He expresses concern for my cat.

“It’ll only take a moment. She’ll be okay.”

“Sprite,” I think he says.

“Sprite? You want some Sprite?”

“No. Soap. And a ham sandwich.”

“You want some water too?”

“Oh no.” He laughs. “I am goooood with ‘da water. I gots more water than I’ll ever drink.”

“People give you water all the time, huh?”

“All. The. Time.”

“I’ll be back, Valentino. Stay right there.”

When I return, I hand him a bag full of soap. “They were out of sandwiches. But I got you some ham and some cheese.”

“It was good to meet you, Valentino. You’re usually out here every week, yeah? We’ve seen each other a few times before, I believe.”

“Every. Day.” Valentino tells me he wrote a poem about it, and recites it from memory. I record it against the wind and the last-minute holiday shoppers crowding the sidewalks, pushing against us.

“I’m walkin’ the streets,
all day long,
tryin’ to find me a job,
and a home.
I am campin’ out in Hollywood Park,
gettin’ good and cold in the dark.
Where I go from here,
I don’t know,
I guess I’ll spend the night,
In a Hollywood show.
There are many people here without a place to go,
but none of them can get into the picture show.
That is the city of the Lost Angels,
That’s my LA.
Now I’m livin’ out here
on these streets,
Doin’ my time until I return to custody.
What I do from here,
I don’t know, but I don’t care.
If you ask for a dime,
You’ll be fine,
But the police will kick you ass,
and you will do some time.
But I love LA,
I can’t do right
for doin’ wrong,
in this corrupt town,
I got to be strong.
I’m lookin’ up, I’m lookin’ down, I’m searchin’ all around
But you don’t hear me though,
I love LA.
And what do I love about it right now?
Absolutely nothin’.”

We both laugh. “That was pretty good.”

Valentino disagrees. “It wasn’t that good. I missed a few lines. I’ve been drinkin’. I’m sure you can smell it.” He puts his head down again as if he’s embarrassed.

“That’s okay. I’m not mad at you. Sometimes I drink in the mornings too. Don’t worry about it.” I touch his shoulder. I ask if he’s got that poem written down anywhere.

“Nah. I’m not a good speller.”

I get this. “I’m not a good speller either,” I tell him. “What do you call that poem?”

Valentino smiles, puts that smoke back in his mouth. This time he gets it lit. “The Poorest Angel,” he says, he winks, he smokes.

“I just saw you sitting here, thought I’d ask if I could get you anything?”

“You have a cigarette on you?”

“No, I don’t smoke.”

“You have ten dollars so I can go buy cigarettes?’

I hate when they take you for a sucker, thinking you don’t have the guts to say, “No,” because you were kind enough to offer. I pat my pockets like I always do when I don’t have cash, as if it helps ease the blow when you learn you’re not getting anything from me. Many folks will say they don’t give to the homeless because they’ll just spend the money on booze and drugs. I know smoking kills, and as I learned from the tragic death of my friend, Dwayne, so does alcohol, but I’ve consumed nicotine and drugs for far weaker excuses than sitting on the side of the road, invisible and ignored, with holes in my clothes and dirt on my face, the relentless summer sun of LA beating down on my back, and no place to privately have a bowel movement.

“I’ll tell you what,” I say, “I’ve got somewhere to be right now, but on my way back through here I’ll stop by the store and pick you up a pack of smokes.”

“Marlboro 100′s, please.”

That the homeless have the nerve to be picky no longer shocks me. They are human, after all.

“And some coffee cake. Some coffee cake would be real good.” Sucker. She takes a bite of the strawberry pop tart in her hand, then offers it to me.

“No thanks, I just ate lunch.”

She laughs. “More for me then.”

I’ll tell her I’ll be back in two hours. She asks for my name.

“Max.”

“Max. I’m Beverly.”

“Nice to meet you, Beverly.”

“God bless.”

“If you’re not here when I get back, I’ll just leave…”

“Oh, I’ll be here, son.” Beverly sits back on her couch, spreads her arms over the back. Someone dumped a stained love seat on the side of the road across from the DMV. It smells of mildew and piss. Beverly has covered it with a blue sleeping bag and sheets. Later she will say she lucked out, just found a sofa sitting there on the side of the road like it was meant for her. She spins a tale about needing a new ID, but the DMV sent it to the wrong address so she’s just waiting out there until they fix the problem.

When I return, Beverly is right where I left her. Though now she is smoking a Black & Mild, and releasing a soggy cough into a bit of crumpled newspaper. I hesitate, rethinking the cigarettes like I might save her life, only to picture a man on the battlefield worn out from war. He is dirty, tired, and uncertain if he will live through this. So he turns to the stranger fighting next to him and asks for a smoke, a fragment of the life he used to know.

“Hi Beverly.”

“Max. I thought you’d never return.”

“Sorry you had to wait so long.”

“I ain’t got nothing better to do.”

I show her everything in the bag I’ve brought with me, including the Marlboro 100′s and matches. I invite myself to have one with her. She’s indifferent. I kneel down, light, inhale, cough. I don’t make it look glamorous. “How long have you been out here?” I ask.

“A few weeks now.”

“That’s not long.” Assuming it’s only been two or three weeks since she left whatever nook of safety she had elsewhere and arrived in Hollywood, I ask, “A few weeks of being right here or do you mean…”

Beverly won’t look me in the eyes. She just watches the road so I ask instead, “How long have you been in LA?”

“I don’t know. What about you? Where you from?”

“I’m from Ohio. Youngstown, OH. You ever hear of Youngstown?”

She nods, but I doubt it. “Why’d you come to California?”

“I thought I was something I’m not.”

She likes this answer. “So then how do you like Hollywood?”

“It’s okay. I meet a lot of nice people like yourself.”

“Well I just moved to the area,” she says and believes it more than I do. “Trying to get situated.”

Beverly is too proud to admit her situation. At least aloud to me. I can tell she is still trying to hang on to the idea that she’s in control and can fix this. I try to tell her I know what it’s like to be homeless, but it doesn’t help. I never had to sleep on the street. She can see that. A man who’s been forced to sleep on concrete carries with him a hardness that’s difficult to miss. I’m soft and she knows it. We understand each other in this moment. She doesn’t want to talk and I should move on. I stand.

“They do things a little different here,” she says as I grind my cigarette beneath my shoe.

“Where were you before this?”

She tells me a part of town I am unfamiliar with.

I say the word “homeless” and regret it.

“I had a place,” she assures me. “They kicked me out. I needed to leave.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Beverly says it was a home for folks with no income and the mentally challenged. Beneath the two fur coats she wears in July, I notice her ocean blue pants. They look like hospital scrubs. On her feet she wears standard issue croc knockoff sandals.

“I’m a Christian,” she says.

I say nothing. Then I say, “Someone once told me when you have nothing left but God…”

“Only then will you realize God is everything.”

“You’ve heard that before, huh?”

“Like I said, I’m a Christian.”

“Sucks to hear, doesn’t it? Someone once said it to me. Doesn’t make your situation any better.”

“You believe the Lord Jesus Christ is your savior?”

“I do.” I’m always careful about admitting my beliefs to the men and women I meet on the street. They’ve been handed one too many tracts, been told Jesus is the answer and he will provide one too many times. They don’t want to hear another Gospel so they say they believe to get you to shut up, or worse, use your faith against you to get what they want. We’re Brothers in Christ. What do you mean five bucks is all you got, motherfucker? You call yourself a Christian?

“I’d best be on my way, Beverly. Is there anything I can do for you before I go?”

“What are you offering?”

“I’d like to help you if I can, but I don’t know what you need.”

She coughs into the wet newspaper in her hands, spits on the ashes of her cigar. “That house right there is mine. They won’t let me in.”

I follow her gaze and point. “That house right there?”

“Mmhmm.”

I’v seen the man who comes and goes from this house. It is not Beverly’s home. Whether she believes it’s really hers or she is saving face in front of me, I can’t be certain.

“Hello, Beverly.” A man in a white t-shirt and jeans approaches, walking the ugliest pitbull in the city, and dragging behind him a large piece of cardboard recently home to a 60-inch flat screen television. “I found this for you.”

“Oh my goodness!” Beverly exclaims. “Thank you. Thank you.” She kisses the air, inches from the hound’s nose. “And how are you? Yes, how are you? So good to see you.” The beast plops himself down on the sidewalk, licks his genitals. His fur is wet, his saliva thick. “I have a biscuit here for you somewhere.” Beverly stands, begins digging through the shopping cart parked next to the couch. “I know it’s here somewhere.”

When she finds the biscuit, she thanks the man – his name is Jose – and feeds the dog who she informs, “Now I finally have a place to go to the bathroom in private. Gonna build me a bathroom.” Beverly pats his head before retiring to the couch. She looks to me, surprised I’m still hanging around. Truth is, I don’t know why I am. I want to go.

“Some dresses,” she says.

“Hmm?”

“You’re still here. So I wanna tell you I could use some dresses. Some longer dresses. Maybe two or three of them. Do you have any dresses?”

I shake my head. “I don’t have any dresses.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “I just wanted to feel like a woman again.”

II

The next day I take a walk down the corrupted and corroding stretch of Vine Street between Fountain and Melrose in Hollywood. Here the streets are not paved with gold like television has lead us to believe. The sidewalks are dark with grime, littered with the overflow of never-emptied trashcans. Here the homeless don’t beg, they simply cower back in the corners and wait for death or jail. They occupy bus stops with tarps and sleeping bags. On national holidays, when no cars are on the road, this stretch of neighborhood is post-apocalyptic perfection. And on this street is the closest Goodwill between Beverly and me.

I’ve never purchased clothes for a woman before without her guidance. Raised by my sisters and mother, I know better than to pick something out for the opposite sex without her having seen it, tried it on, and clearly stated the correct size. I browse the aisles, hold things up, place them back on racks, and eventually collect a number of blankets, dresses, and pants. I wait behind a woman in line simultaneously struggling to hold up three mini desktop fans and her pants. I try not to look, and wonder if she even notices. Or cares. When it’s my turn I pay, and sling the bag of Beverly’s new clothes over my shoulder, and make my way back to her couch.

“Hello again, Beverly.”

“Max.” Beverly looks up from digging through her shopping cart. Clouds hang low and loose above us. “It looks like rain,” she says. “Just trying to get my affairs in order so I can stay dry.” Today she’s wearing a red bicycle helmet.

I tell her I brought some clothes. And a new blanket. She looks inside, nods, and asks for cigarettes. A sour anger forms in my gut. Not even a thank you? I imagine snatching the bag back from her dirty hands and giving the clothes to someone else. “Cigarettes? I just bought you cigarettes yesterday. You smoked them all already?”

“Of course I smoked them all already.”

“You gotta learn to ration, Beverly.”

“It was a long night. Can you get me cigarettes or not?”

I let out a deep sigh. I think about my night indoors. I think about going inside to get out of the this rain. “I just bought you these clothes, Beverly. I don’t have any extra money. I’m just an underpaid writer.”

“You bought these?”

“Well I didn’t have any dresses and such just sitting around my house.”

Beverly makes a show of going back into the bag, holding up each piece of clothing, bringing the blanket close to her face. “So you’re a writer? You any good?” Before she gives me a chance to answer, she tells me she’s a writer too. “Poetry,” she says, but she reminds me everything is still back at her old place. “Maybe you can take me back to where I used to live? I have to get my things. You told me yesterday you drive a cab.”

I shake my head. “That wasn’t me, Beverly. I don’t have a car during the day. My wife takes it to work.”

“Oh, you’re married? How do you like being married?”

“I love it. Are you married?”

“Once… I can give you gas money.”

“You can’t even buy your own cigarettes.”

“Oh. Right. Right. I just need to get back there and get my Bible.”

“Why’d you leave it behind?”

“Because.”

“Because?” Talking to Beverly is like talking to a preschooler already occupied with cartoons and toys. She stops digging and says, “Because I had to go. They wanted things from me that me, as a Christian woman, couldn’t give them. Sexual things.”

I tell Beverly maybe it’s not a good idea to go back there, but she says that’s not an option. She needs her Bible.

I think of the extra Bible I have at home. I found it on the top shelf of the closet after I moved in. I almost threw it away, but when I was ten I killed a spider in my bedroom with my Bible and cried for weeks, sobbing into my mother’s shoulder, “But I killed one of God’s creations with God’s word!” And throwing away a Bible, well, that seemed at least twice as bad as the incident with the arachnid.

I ask Beverly if she wants a new Bible. I tell her I can bring one to her.

“King James? I ain’t readin’ anything but that King James version.”

The next day I don’t go back even though I promised I would. Some days it’s too hard to get myself out of the house and visit with a stranger. I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to sit amongst her misfortune and discarded Pop Tart wrappers. I don’t want to smell the piss and the mildew. I don’t want to say, “no,” to another pack of cigarettes or to another ride back to that mysterious house full of the sexually abused and mentally ill. Not today.

So I stay indoors.

And I wait until tomorrow.

And when tomorrow comes, Beverly will be gone. The discarded couch picked up by the city and taken to a dump by two men that will have no idea someone has made it their home. A neighbor will have gotten tired of looking out their window, seeing it and seeing Beverly forced to squat behind it for privacy. When it happens, Beverly will be away, pushing a shopping cart, collecting cans to recycle. She will be in the parking lot of the grocery store asking for cigarettes, or perhaps chatting with Jose and his dog. I will try not to think about her returning to discover her only sense of familiarity gone, then aimlessly shoving along with her cart looking for the next nook or street corner offering shelter.

I will keep the Bible on the top shelf of my closet, waiting for its new owner to cross my path because Los Angeles is a small city, and I am confident Beverly and I will meet again. I will try to take comfort knowing she is clothed and warm. And I will pray some other sucker like me buys her a pack of smokes.

“That’s Glen with one ‘n,’” he tells me. “None of that two ‘n’ bullshit.”

We shake hands. Glen’s grip is as loose and suspicious as his eyes. Are you buyin’ or what? I can feel them asking behind the comfort of his gas station sunglasses.

“How long have you been selling out here?” I ask.

“Two, three months.”

“They don’t mind?” I point to the coffee shop in front of us. I watched Glen stalking the patio earlier, smoking cigarette butts he’d collected from the ground as I worked from inside. The man seemed irate over the endless amount of customers looking for a place to sip their macchiatos. He waited until it was clear, reached over the railing and lifted a table right off the patio. And then a chair. On the sidewalk Glen had set up shop selling incense.

“They don’t mind,” Glen answers. “Do you want any incense? I got all kinds.” He speaks slow like he’s not entirely certain he’s chosen the right words, leaving a long enough pause between each sentence to gage my reaction. Is he confused? Nodding? He’s nodding. Okay. Good. Next.

I pat my pockets even though I know I don’t have any money. “Glen. Man. I wish I could. I just, I don’t have any money on me right now.”

Glen crosses his legs. I believe I am being ignored. He’s heard this story enough times today. I try to show I still care about him and his business by asking where he gets his incense from. “What lead you to this?” I ask.

Glen sips lemonade from a plastic cup. His right hand rests on his knee, the first two fingers permanently pressed together from years of clutching smokes. He sets the lemonade beneath his chair then looks up, surprised to see me. “Chill, man. I don’t feel like telling you my whole life story.” He elongates the word ‘man’ like his parents just told him to clean his room when all he wants to do is smoke a joint with his pals.

I raise my hands to show Glen I meant know offense. “Fair enough.” I wish him luck, and set off to catch my bus. Five blocks south at the corner of Hollywood and Vermont I wait, an ATM right behind me. He’ll be fine, I think. I need to get home, I tell myself. My wife is waiting for me.

Dammit.

I take forty from the ATM and walk north.

“Glen,” I say, returning to his makeshift shop. “I’d like to buy some incense.”

“Changed your mind?”

“My wife loves the stuff. I’d be a fool not to show up with some. How much?”

“These boxes here, these boxes are one dollar. Actually, all boxes are one dollar. I also sell stands. You need a stand? Stands are two dollars.”

“One dollar? That’s quite a deal. Business must be good.”

“What do you think?”

I shrug. “I get it.” I inspect the boxes like I know what’s what.

“That right there, that’s good stuff. Real nice.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Real nice.”

I pick up the few boxes he has. “I’ll take one of everything. And a stand too.”

“What? Seriously? Wow. Man. Wow.”

I had Glen a twenty. Then another twenty. I say keep the change. I know the man isn’t looking for a friend so I thank him and walk away.

“I’ve been sober six years!” he calls out. I stop, turn. “I’ve done everything. If you can smoke it, I’ve inhaled it. If you can shoot it, it’s been in my veins. And if you can snort it, well,” he wipes his nose with the back of his hand, takes out another half-smoked cigarette, lights it. “Been six years since the last time I took anything. I can’t even take a goddamn pain pill.” He exhales a cloud of smoke. “Fifty years I was drunk.”

I try hard not to shout “FIFTY YEARS!? HOW ARE YOU STILL ALIVE!?” Instead, I tell Glen how proud of him I am, that I hope he’s proud of himself too. “What was your wake-up call? How does someone get sober after fifty years of abuse?”

“I got tired of going to prison.” His laugh is like an asthmatic having an attack. “Now I’m sellin’ incense instead of drugs.”

The last time Glen got arrested, he was high on cocaine and was court ordered to spend a year in rehab. “When I went in, I said, ‘I’m using the day I get out.’ And then I got out. And I didn’t want to use. What do you think of that?”

I tell him again how proud I am, and that I know how hard it is to get sober.

“Well, I got help. I’ve got a sponsor. I go to meetings. I got myself a higher power. I need it because doin’ this…” he points to the incense, “I’m offered weed all the time. I’m offered speed. Coke. You name it.”

“How do you resist?”

“I see how messed up they are. And I see myself in them. I don’t want my life like that. You really think you’re something else when you’re high. This’ll help.” He holds up the twenties. “This’ll help. I’m trying to get out of my current living conditions.”

Glen lives in an underfunded building called House of Hope. A sort of halfway home for parolees, the homeless, and ex-cons. 35 occupants. 3 bathrooms. 6 people to a room no bigger than your bedroom. “Sounds ironically hopeless, don’t it?” Glen is the sixth guy in his already over-crowded room. “It’s about as big as this patio.” My car is bigger than the patio Glen shoves his thumb towards. “We sleep like sardines. And I’ve got to pay $400 a month to stay there.”

“Wait. What?”

“Four. Hundred.”

“How do the men that stay there afford that?”

He says House of Hope also takes general relief, but I don’t know what that is until I Google it. According to the Los Angeles County Website, GR is a “county-funded program that provides financial assistance to indigent adults who are ineligible for federal or State programs.” Glen tries to earn all the money on his own, any way he can. He says he gets the incense from some, “Real bad folk I used to know down off Crenshaw.” They cut him a deal and now Glen is just looking for someone who’s got an extra room.

“I wish I had an extra room for you, Glen, I do.”

“Nah, man. Nah.” Glen drops the butt of his smoke, grinding it into the concrete with his toe. He sips his lemonade, sighs.

“Can I get you anything else, Glen? Are you good on food? Do you need a coffee? Anything?”

“No, I’m good, man. I’m a vegetarian. I got six years of that too. I figure if I’m gonna go straight, I’m goin’ all the way.”

I first meet Dwayne in my garage. He’s sleeping in the carport below my apartment, sprawled out on a generic grey wool blanket Christian missionaries and local shelters hand out day after day, and tucked into a purple sleeping bag. It’s late. The streets are quiet and cold. He doesn’t panic as my headlights wash over him illuminating rose-colored cheeks, skin browned with soot and dust. I can see dirt in the stubble of a grey beard so jagged it’s surely capable of drawing blood. He tugs at the charcoal beanie snug over his ears. In the months that follow, even in the summer heat so alive it swims through your eyes and lungs, I will never see him without this hat upon his head.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “Don’t get up.”

“I was just looking for a place to rest my head. I’ll get out of your way.”

With the Great Difficulty that often accompanies the sudden awakening from an alcohol-induced slumber, Dwayne struggles to gather his belongings. It doesn’t amount to much. A backpack full of holes. A sleeping bag. A plastic jug filled with what I presume is water but will quickly discover is vodka. A Tom Clancy novel.

“You can sleep here. I don’t mind.”

“No. No.”

“Seriously. Stay. My car will cover you.”

He stays skeptical, propping himself up with an elbow as if posing for a painting. He can’t understand why I’m not calling the police, kicking him out. He pops the lid on his jug. His fingers are fat and red like overcooked hotdogs, the cracks in his skin now black with pollution. He says he is going to have a drink. Do I mind if he has a drink?

“No,” I say. He takes a swig, passes me the jug. I kindly decline.

“You sober?” He asks this like it’s the only logical explanation as to why I would reject sharing a bottle with him. I look at the white saliva gathering at the corners of his lips.

“I try to watch my alcohol,” I say.

He nods. Smiles. His rudolph nose glowing stop-light red. With a rumble in his throat, he sucks back the snot driven out of it by the cold. “God bless you. This shit will kill you.” His words are stained with liquor store vodka. I can taste it in the air. “Best decision I ever made, going sober.”

“Are you drunk now?”

He tries to sit up. The question makes him uncomfortable like he’s been asked this too many times by too many people he’s loved. “I’ve had a few tonight. But I’ve got my wits about me.”

During the duration of our friendship, the timeline will forever be fractured as to just how long Dwayne has been drinking and how long he’s been sober. Some days he’s ten years sober. Others, he hasn’t been sober in ten years.

I ask the man if he needs anything. Dinner? New blankets? He asks for pasta. “Any chance you have some pasta? I’ve got some Italian in my blood.”

I do. I invite him inside for dinner. Tell him he can even take a shower if he’d like.

He declines the invitation to come inside. Says it makes him uncomfortable. “I’ve been on the streets so long. I don’t remember how to use my inside voice.” So I tell him to wait there while my wife and I cook up a pasta dinner inside. We make up plates for ourselves and him. We gather in the garage and eat together. “Do you mind if I pray a blessing over the meal?” I ask.

He doesn’t. He respectfully bows his head. Waits to eat until our prayer ends. I catch him mumbling a blessing my parents had us recite night after night in my home: Bless us oh Lord for these gifts which we are about to receive, from they bounty, through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then with his fork he carefully stabs one noodle at a time.

I inquire about his prayer. I will soon learn that Dwayne grew up in Youngstown, OH. “No shit!” he will exclaim when I tell him that’s where I was born and raised too. “The rough and tumble town of steel,” he says. “They’ll kill you faster in Youngstown than they’ll ever kill you here.” We talk about the old streets we’ve both walked on, and the neighborhoods we’ve lived in. I shake my head in disbelief. “What are the chances of all the carports in all of Los Angeles that you would end up in one belonging to some guy from Youngstown?”

Friends will later tell me it must have been a God thing. It was certainly some kind of thing.

Dwayne would eventually marry a girl from there, but the alcohol will get the best of their relationship, as it will every relationship after her. She will gamble away every cent that is his in Vegas, and so will begin his journey on the streets.

“Going on twenty-five years now that I’ve been on these here streets.” There’s a nonthreatening roughness to his voice. He speaks like a man who has seen it all and is ready for it to all be over.

Dwayne asks if he’s allowed to rest his head. He’s tired. I clean up our dishes, leave him with an extra pillow. I make sure he knows he can stash his belongings here as long as he’d like. “They’ll be safe,” I promise. He slurs out a thank you, tucking the pillow beneath his head, slipping into his sleeping bag and then into darkness.

He will last one week living in our carport. Dwayne will be gone during the days collecting cans and bottles and change where he can, always looking for the next drink to keep him warm. We will exchange hellos and stories at night as our lives intersect when the sun sets until the day I come outside and find his pillow, his blankets, his backpack gone, cleaned out by the property’s owner. “I’ve invested a lot of money into this building,” the landlord will later tell me after a future incident with Dwayne. “I installed new lights in these carports to keep men like him out of here.” It’s finally spring, but I won’t see Dwayne again until the summer. Until then all I can picture is Dwayne returning home late one evening to find everything he owns has been taken from him. Again. I pray for his safety, that he doesn’t hold me responsible. I pray that we can still be friends.

II

My wife, Lauren, bakes two batches of fresh cinnamon rolls on Thanksgiving morning. We set out into the cold November sun with fifty bottles of water in our trunk and four cases of blueberry muffins in the backseat.

“Dwayne!” I shout when we reach the corner of Melrose and Vine. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Happy Thanksgiving, brother.” We shake hands. Lauren hands him a plate of cinnamon rolls. He’s acquired a red shopping cart from Target. It’s filled with books and blankets and beer. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” He puts his head back, soaking in the sun, his face flushed out with red. He introduces us to the man next to him. “This is Thomas.” Thomas is a tall, muscular black man with a black beard wearing black sweats and a black jacket.

Dwayne asks what our plans are for the day. He compliments Lauren. Tells her she is beautiful. Thanks us for breakfast. When we ask if he’s getting dinner anywhere, he says he and Thomas know of a few shelters serving hot turkey. “We’re going to be just fine.” He tugs the beanie atop his head down over his ears.

III

“You fucking piece of shit nigger. Get the fuck out of here you fucking bitch. You dirty piece of shit. Get out. Get out. You don’t belong here. Nigger.”

“Is that Dwayne?” Lauren asks, sitting up in bed. Our apartment faces the backside of another complex, creating an alley that ricochets sound like gunfire. It’s hard to identify the origin – our building or the one across the way – but you never miss an argument, an orgasm, a breakup.

“He’s going to get the cops called on him. You should check to see if he’s okay.”

I put on a jacket and shoes. Grab a bottle of water from the fridge. “I’ll be right back, okay? Just listen. You’ll know if something goes wrong.”

I go out the back door, step into the alley. Dwayne has his back to me, sitting on an orange and black tiger print fleece blanket, hand gripped to a bottle. “You stupid nigger! You think you can cross me like that?”

I whisper his name. He turns, startled, eyes wide. A dangerous combination of cold and alcohol has turned his face into a stop sign. He smiles. Dwayne’s teeth are surprisingly white for twenty-five years without dental care. I assume the vodka keeps his mouth cleaner than toothpaste.

“Max! I see you fucking everywhere, man.” He reaches his hand out to shake mine.

Does he even know where he is? Of course he’s going to see me here. I put my finger to my lips, kneel down. “You’ve got to be quiet, man, you’re scaring people.” I hand him the bottle of water. He snatches it up, nearly rips the thing in half removing the cap, and downs the contents in one miraculous swallow. The whole thing is rather like watching a gorilla eat a banana on the Discovery Channel. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, man, yeah. Just this fucking guy…” His words come out with the clarity and proficiency of a man who has had twenty-five years to perfect the art of speaking under the influence.

“Who?”

“Ah, he’s gone, man.”

I’m not sure he was ever even there. “Look, Dwayne, you’re scaring people. You’ve got to keep quiet. Someone is going to call the police.”

“Mmhmm.” He passes me the bottle. “Drink?”

“Not tonight Dwayne.”

“Mmhmm. I haven’t been sober in eight fucking years, man. I’m tired.” He digs through his shopping cart, pulls out a magazine, sets it before me. “Want that?”

A naked latino woman in red lipstick and black heels graces the cover, legs spread wide. It’s not the kind of pornography you should be proud to put on display, but shame isn’t exactly a thing someone in Dwayne’s position is familiar with. I want to ask him what the hell he is doing looking at that, but the last thing he needs in this moment is a lesson on the dangers of pornography.

“I haven’t been with a real woman in twenty years. You think I’m gonna sleep with these prostitutes on the street out here?” He shakes his head. Takes a drink. Takes the magazine back. “Gotta have someone to keep me company. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been on these streets? Fucking concrete. Everything is cold concrete.”

Patrick Ersig, founder and leader of the Jonah Project in downtown LA, a homeless shelter empowering men and women to get off the streets, find work, and turn their lives around once told me, “Have you ever stayed up all night? It’s extremely difficult to function the next day. Now imagine you have to go to into work. Wearing the same clothes you stayed up in and without a shower. And when you come home, you’re locked out of the house. So you have to sleep in the driveway. It’s cold outside. You don’t have any blankets. And you’re on the concrete. Now you might be so tired from the night before that you sleep for an hour or two, but the rest of the time you’re scared. You’re alone. What if someone tries to take advantage of you? Rob you? The next day you go back to work. Still in the same clothes. When you come home, you have to sleep in the driveway again. And you sleep with one eye open. To protect yourself. And so you don’t miss the locksmith. Now imagine doing this for a week. A month. A year. You’d start drinking and slip into insanity too.”

“Dwayne, can you stay quiet for me?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Sure man. Bring me some pasta?”

“I’ll give you pasta if you agree not to say another word tonight.”

He nods. Tosses the magazine back into his shopping cart. Rests against the wall. Mouths a “thank you.” Closes his eyes.

Back inside Lauren will tell me our neighbor, Alice, has texted her. Alice wanted to know if that was me she heard outside, and wasn’t Lauren scared? Lauren says, “I told her, ‘No, no I’m not scared. It’s just Dwayne.’ A few moments later, me boiling penne noodles, Lauren in bed, there is a knock at our door. It’s Alice. She doesn’t understand why I went out there. “You’re putting everyone here in danger,” she says. “What if you got stabbed?”

“I wasn’t going to get stabbed. It’s just Dwayne.”

“And what are you going to do when Lauren is here and you’re not around to be the White Knight and protect everyone?” She turns to Lauren. “Are you not scared?”

“I didn’t go down there to be a White Knight. I went down there for him. Not for you.”

“What are you going to do when Lauren gets attacked because you socialize with them? Or one of the other girls in this building. You’re putting us all at risk.”

“What kind of misguided mindset do you have about the homeless?”

“They’re dangerous.”

“They’re hungry.”

“I come home to find shit and piss in my parking space. I’m trying to be the good neighbor here. But you guys aren’t helping. I’m trying to rally everyone, to call the police when they are around.”

“That’s fine. You should call the police if you feel threatened. I will never stop you. But I will also never call the police if I see a homeless person digging through our dumpster or sleeping in the garage.”

“Great,” Alice says. “Because I called the police and they are on their way.” She tells me she won’t hesitate to call the landlord too. I can’t tell if this is a threat to have us evicted, to scare us into no longer helping the homeless.

The officers who arrive on the scene to quiet down Dwayne will tell me there is nothing they can do to the homeless. Not anymore. “We used to tear down their tents, beat them up. Not anymore. Not since the new civil rights bill passed stating that the homeless have just as much of a right to engage in life-sustaining activities on public property as you do. So. We can’t stop them from sleeping on benches or sidewalks anymore. And as far as this guy being in your alley, well, we say ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ Would you prefer to have him here in the alley or on the sidewalk out front? Because if we ask him to move, we can’t tell him to go any farther than that.”

When the police leave, instructing me to call if there are any more issues (they will make him pour out his alcohol and move on), I give Dwayne his pasta. He kept his promise. Even under the pressure of the police, he didn’t say a word.

IV

The following night I find Dwayne sleeping behind my car, tucked deep inside his purple sleeping bag. The porn he offered me by his side. I kick his boot. “Dwayne. Wake up.” He lifts his head. “Put that shit away.” He slides the magazine under his sleeping bag. “Listen, I am never going to ask you to leave, but I want you to know after last night the people in this building don’t want to see you around here anymore. If they see you, they are going to call the cops. I don’t care if you are here, you are always welcome in my home, but I just need you to know it’s going to get us both in trouble, having you around.”

Alice had followed up on her promise. Earlier in the day I’d been instructed by our Landlord to no longer interact with the homeless on his property. I don’t tell Dwayne this. I just tell him to keep his wits about him.

“I get it man, I get it. I’ll leave.”

“No, that’s not the way it is. I just wanted…”

“I get it. I’ll be out of your hair soon.”

“Just…”

He closes his eyes. Our conversation is over. I get in the car and as I pull out of the garage he raises his hand, offers me a peace sign at the end of his fully extended arm. The shadow of his body splashes across the wall in the wake of my headlights. I crack the window. “Peace, brother.” An entire year now passed since the night we first met in this garage. And as I pull away, I have no idea it is the last time Dwayne and I will ever speak.

V

I will find him dead on the sidewalk outside of my house a week later. I will think he is only drunk, or perhaps, at the worst of it, injured. Causing a scene. But there are too many cars and not enough commotion. I won’t be able to see his face, not from where I stand, but his red santa clause belly and blue pants will creep out from behind the white unmarked police cruiser labeled “coroner.” And his red Target shopping cart, parked and toppled over, spilling the purple sleeping bag I’ve come to recognize will tell me all I need to know. I will want to go inside, crumble to the floor, and tell myself it is someone else. That whoever it is isn’t even dead, and I can go about my day. But I force one foot in front of the other. I already know it’s him before the name, “Dwayne,” escapes from Officer Kim’s lips.

“Did you identify him yet?” I will ask. “Do you know who that man is?”

“Yeah. We got a name. Dwayne. Did you know him?”

The syllables sound foreign. I will need the officer to repeat himself. “No. No. No. It can’t be. I was just with him last week.” There is nothing that can prepare the mind to better process death. To face a body once full of life you’ve invested in. The world, it seems, isn’t quite on the axis it used to be.

My wife is only feet away. She doesn’t know. She can’t know. I need to turn, to go, tell her it’s not him. It’s someone else we haven’t met, but she’s there, she’s touching me, and all I can say is, “It’s Dwayne, it’s him, it’s Dwayne. It’s him.”

And maybe Lauren will ask if I am serious and maybe the blood will drain from her face as Officer Kim tells me Dwayne drank himself to death.

They will grab his ankles and his head, a human lollipop, a man now dressed for halloween as a ghost. The coroners heave his lifeless body into the back of an ambulance.

“He’s my friend,” I will say. “We used to eat together. Did he have ID on him?”

“We found a prescription pill bottle in his pockets,” Kim points to the liquor store just a few doors down from my place. “The owner was the first to identify him. Said he’s been buying alcohol right here every day for twenty-five years.”

“Jesus.”

“He’d been on the streets a long time.”

“Twenty-five years,” an aging Mexican man creeping along the edge of the crime scene in a white cowboy hat and wooden walking stick will confirm. “He was so friendly. Used to see him all the time. Said he’d been sober for ten years.”

Kim nods. “Often when these guys relapse, they relapse themselves right into the grave.”

How perfectly fitting, I will think, for Dwayne to come to a stop here, on my street, beside the only place left in his world that may have felt like home.

I try to convince myself he finally grew too tired to take one more step and decided to sit down, just for a moment, to get a little bit more of that rest he was always talking about, and close his eyes for good. I want know that he heard God’s voice calling to him, “It’s time to come home, son. There’s no more pain here.” And did he know that when he went he wasn’t alone? God, please don’t let him have believed he died alone. Did he know he had a friend two doors down? Was he crawling to me? I cannot know. The truth is I am blind and he is gone.

I will cry at home. I have no idea where he is now. He has no one to mourn him. No one to celebrate his life.

I spent an entire year with him and never once do I ask Dwayne if he knows Jesus. I will cook him dinner and eat with him in garages. I will invite him in to shower and rest in warm blankets. I will buy him breakfast on Thanksgiving, and will console him when he is drunk. He will tell me his stories and I will listen, but I will never try to save him. I will grip my wife’s arm as I cry that I have failed, that I could have done more, and now I will never know. I didn’t want him to feel like I was just another white Christian Evangalist on the streets of LA trying to save souls. I wanted him to know I was a friend. I just wanted to be his friend. And now he is gone and I want so badly to believe he is in the arms of a savior. That he’s drinking wine in heaven without pain or sorrow.

But I just. don’t. know.

“He was on the street for twenty-five years,” Lauren will say, her fingertips in my hair. “We’ve met so many homeless men and women of faith. I do not believe – I cannot believe – he spent all those years on the streets without once hearing the Gospel.”

Today his shopping cart haunts my sidewalk, left behind for city officials to clean up. I photograph it. It’s all of Dwayne that remains. I never took a picture of him. I can’t remember his last name. I search the Internet and papers for a write-up about his death, his life, but discover nothing. There is no evidence of his existence beyond these words. His son, his ex-wife, a long lost friend will have received a call by now informing them he’s passed. The police will say he’s left them nothing. They won’t mention the shopping cart. His sleeping bag crawling with bugs or his wool blanket. The six-hundred page novel by Tom Clancy. They won’t mention the discarded vodka or the porn magazine shoplifted from liquor store shelves, the prescriptions in his pockets.

A shopping cart taken from Target now a digital tombstone on the Internet. I want to celebrate his life incase no one else ever does. So he will live on here forever. And maybe here he can have the life he never did. Maybe now he can have the friends he thought had all abandoned him. Maybe here he can be remembered as something more than homeless. Something greater than an addict.

As he took his last sip, his last breath, I want the world to know he died not a drunk or a failure, but as friend. A neighbor.

“Shine your windows while you shop?” Lawrence Harvey asks, holding a white cloth in one hand, windex in the other. “I’ll be fast, I promise. Have your vee-hicle done by the time you get out.” Stretching out the ‘e’ in vehicle, Harvey hooks the spray bottle to his belt, pulls at the rim of his ten gallon cowboy hat. A regular gunslinger. Boots and a plaid shirt tucked in with little care to dirty khakis.

“My wife was just telling me the car needs washed,” I say.

Harvey saunters over to the car as if he planned to do the job with or without my permission. “I’ll be done in two shakes.”

“Take your time, friend. What’s your name?”

“Folks call me Harvey.”

We stand in a crowded grocery store parking lot at the corner of Melrose and Vine. Shopping carts crash by us, horns blaring in battle over empty spaces. I ask Harvey how business is today.

“I’ll keep a roof over my head one more day. Gotta work harder now. Because I’ll tell you what. I was on the street before. Now I got my own apartment in Korea Town.” Harvey pauses at the end of every sentence, looks me in the eye like he’s making sure I’ve heard him. “I keep me a little bit of food in the fridge… Some coffee in the cupboard… And a couple of cigarettes… I smoke cigarettes. I don’t drink though.”

“Everybody’s got a vice. How’d you get off the streets?”

“I got sick and tired or being sick and tired.” He picks dirt off my windshield with his fingernail.

“Is this how you make your living?” I ask.

He says no. That this is just part time. When Harvey isn’t washing windows, he’s on a ranch outside of the city, shoeing horses.

“Shooing?” I ask, picturing an old man and a broom.

What he means, I learn, is farrier. He cares for a horses hooves, and puts on their shoes. A trade that not only involves blacksmith and veterinarian skills, but a unique ability to speak to the horse, calm the horse.

“When I ain’t with the horses, I’m out here. You know how you got hobbies?”

“Yeah, I’ve got hobbies.”

“Shoeing horses is my hobby.” He stops cleaning the passenger side window to smile at me. He’s missing the right front tooth and the two teeth that are supposed to be next to it. This gap in his smile releases a small spray of spit on his S’s and T’s.

I ask Harvey if he’s ever been kicked or injured.

He laughs. “Son, if a horse kicked me now, I’d kick it back.”

When Harvey is fourteen, a horse backs up on him. He throws his arms into the air – a natural reaction to the surprise – and the animal kicks. Its hooves break Harvey’s wrist and arm. A fellow rancher will ask if he’s okay. Harvey will reply, “I’ll live. It was a long way from the heart.”

Harvey asks if I know who Charles Sampson is.

I shrug.

Sampson is the first African American bull rider to win the world championship. A black kid who saw bull riding as a way to ride out of the ghetto. As a young man he took a job at a riding stable in Gardena, CA to avoid the violence that surrounded him. Standing at just 5 feet 4 inches, Sampson was one of only six black men in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association back in 1983. He was quoted in the New York Times having said of his profession, “I haven’t encountered discrimination as much as ignorance. Some people still don’t realize that something like a quarter of all the cowboys back in the Old West were black.” Just because Sampson had dark skin didn’t mean he couldn’t ride.

Harvey says he knows Charles Sampson. They ride together as young boys. Until Harvey is hooked in the neck by a bull. “This is back in the late 60′s,” he says, “when they didn’t cut the horns on the cows… I was bowin’ down to him. He lifted his head, fast and with purpose, hooked me the neck. I came to, I said, ‘No more cows.’” Harvey then begins riding bucking horses for the next twenty years. “I got on my last bucking horse in 1986,” he says. “I was thrown off, busted both my knees. Didn’t walk for quite some time. Those bucking horses, they full of grain and fire.”

Born in Los Angeles, Harvey grows up with the horses in the family. Says he also grows up singing. Whenever he is out with the horses as a boy, he sings country western while he rides. “Like a real cowboy,” he says. “You know what Yodelin’ is? I learned it out in Perris, California in 1970. It goes like this….”

“Yessiree,” he shouts over my applause. “Yessir. I sung gospel when I was downtown on Skid Row. I joined a group to keep me out of trouble. We sang the Gospel. A cappella. You know what that is? It means with no instruments. I’m a baritone. First and second baritone. First tenor. Second tenor. And bass. I do bass too. The guy doing bass, I could beat him. But I didn’t trip on that. I was just happy to be singing. We were singing all over Skid Row. For free. For free! Two, three years. I don’t care about who leads what. I don’t trip. I just want to sound good in front of people. We changed people’s lives. We changed our own lives. One by one we got off Skid Row. They wanted to keep singing, but I got back with them horses. I said, ‘This is what I love, messin’ ‘dem horses.’”

Skid Row is a makeshift neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles, home to one of the cities largest concentration of homelessness.

I don’t want to be rude but I put some distance between us, casually wiping my brow. I ask him how he ended up on Skid Row what with all his work on the ranch.

“I used to be a jockey when I was fifteen, fourteen, thirteen,” he says. “I rode the Victorville track in ’69. Got beat by a photo-finish. By a nose, brother. By a nose. Guy seen me ride that race, he said, ‘You wanna come live on my ranch? Care for my horses. I’ll pay you twenty-five dollars a week. Give you room and board and food.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ That was the most money I’d ever heard of a young boy making. Left home when I was fifteen. I ain’t been back since.”

The ranch is in Perris, California where Harvey will stay and work until he is seventeen. He will attend Paris High School, taking the D’s and F’s he received in Compton, and turn them into A’s and B’s. He will walk the proverbial three miles to and from the bus stop every single day, and claim to have never missed not even an hour of school in those three years. Not one. “I went home, did my homework, trained the horses, cleaned the stalls. I was doing what I loved. It was that easy to succeed. I see all these youngsters here today, see them with the wrong fellas just like I was back in Compton. Breaks my heart.”

After graduation Harvey tells his boss it’s time to move on. He’s been living there for three years. Now seventeen, Harvey feels it is time to go and see the world. His first stop and his first mistake will be returning to LA where he falls right back in with his old crowd. They treat him as though he never left. It will only be a matter of time before Harvey starts doing drugs again after three years sober. “You get caught up in that circle. It’s like a tornado. And when that tornado cuts you loose, it’s up to you to brace for impact.”

Harvey scrapes month-old bird shirt off the hood of my car with his thumb.

“A lot of these people out here on the streets, they out here because they wanna be. They gotta get sick and tired of being sick and tired. That’s the only way. No institution, jail, or death is gonna stop them until they make up their own mind. You can help the homeless all you want, but if they ain’t gonna help themselves… well, you lead the horse to the water but you can’t make him drink. If you try, he’s gonna kick the shit outta you.”

Harvey talks about seeing the negative of the negative on the street. “You at the lost stop when you get that low. And the way I see it, you gots two options: you either gotta get up or say, ‘this is how I’m goin out.’”

Harvey wants to be clear it was not just the drugs and the wrong crowd that lead him to the streets. It took a lot of bad decisions to get there. Including his marriage. “I was married one time. Caught a man in my bed. I only knew her for six months, my wife. I didn’t really want to marry her. But I was infatuated. Caught up. She was young. Nineteen. I was twenty-four. Her father was a gangster out of New Orleans. I was scared. I had no game. She had better game.” Harvey hooks the spray bottle back to his belt, puts his thumb through a loop. “She was bad from the beginning to the end. I came home one afternoon, she had a negligé on. Nothing else. Then there’s this guy in my bed. Wearing shorts and nothing else. Smoking a joint. I said, ‘You know we got a pile of guns in this house, don’t you? But I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt. Because you see, this ain’t your home. Which means my wife here, it’s only obvious she had to let you in. Now I recommend it’s time for both of you to leave.’ I shook his hand, changed my clothes, and left before he did. Never did go back. And eventually found my way to the streets from there.”

When he filed for divorce, his lawyer asked why he didn’t just kill them both and plead insanity.

“I said to him, ‘I’m just gonna let this one ride. She’s someone else’s problem now. I’m gonna do something better. I’m gonna get a divorce.’ I ain’t been married since. I don’t care how long it takes. You gotta learn each other from the inside. Understanding is the best thing in the world. And that comes with being open with each other.”

He wants me to know anyone can end up on the streets. He says no one chooses to end up there, but they do choose to stay.

Back on Santa Monica and Vine in the late 80′s, Harvey works at a down-out-joint called the Three of Clubs. In the back of the bar is a boxing gym. And above the boxing gym is a recording studio. “So I’m back there taking care of the cars, cleaning windows for everyone there. Everyone there has money. And the guys in the recording studio, they heard me sing. Cause I sing when I clean cars. And Big D, he says, ‘Can you come up here to the studio?’ So they bust out the acoustic and they play and I’m singing, put some words to their music. They made money. Paid me $150 in cash. While they made millions, they were paying me scraps. So I started saying no. Not unless there’s a contract. Well, they never invited me back up to sing.”

In 2002, Harvey gets himself a bed at a homeless shelter downtown. The Union Rescue Mission. “Guy in the bed next to me, Big D. I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘I was on that heroine.’ He was smart, intelligent. He lost everything.”

Harvey sighs, watches the bearded man in a skull cap and overcoat digging through the trashcan a few feet away.

“Skid Row is the last shot. They got help for you , but it’s a trap at the same time. Outside the shelters they got drugs and alcohol and hookers. Whatever you need. It’s designed for you to be down. I ain’t strong. So I don’t go downtown. It’s the last stop. Anything goes on Skid Row.”

He grabs my shoulder again. “I ain’t trying to do nothing wrong anymore. I already done enough wrong.” He laughs deep from with his guts. “If you ain’t with God,” he shouts, “where you gonna be? Hey, spell God backwards.”

Pause. “Dog?”

“Dog! That’s right! There ain’t no in-between.”

We share a laugh.

I thank him for the windows. “This looks great. Let me see how much cash I’ve got…”

“I take credit card and check.” He winks.

I hand Harvey whatever cash is in my pocket. We shake. He thanks me for listening, for caring about his story.

“If I ever see you again,” he says, “and you don’t have no money, I’m gonna hook you up. Clean windows for life. I ain’t never forget a face or a car, and you ain’t never gonna have dirty windows again. Not as long as I’m around.”

“You are American? I speak English. Will you speak to me? My name is Sanjay.” He sticks his hand through the crowd of children surrounding my camera.

I take Sanjay’s hand. His grip is firm. The sun is hot today, blasting through the perpetual haze of dust and smog hanging low in the air. You can’t open your mouth without tasting it on your tongue. Sanjay wears a hat with a flat brim that looks fresh from the store. He’s also in shorts. Something men in his culture never do. He looks different than the others I’ve met today. Perhaps there is more life in his eyes than most.

“Where are you from in America?” he asks.

“California,” I tell him. “Your English is excellent.”

“Thank you. Thank you.” He speaks slow and deliberate, handling with care every syllable as to not mispronounce a single word. “I am excited to have a conversation with you. I love your language. It can be very… elegant. I have been studying English for years. Ever since I saw an American Tom Cruise movie.”

Even in broken, third-world countries, you cannot escape the television. Men will run cables for hundreds of miles to hang a small screen in the corner of their bamboo and tin roadside tea shack. Men will spend hours standing around, spilling into the street, drinking tea and watching whatever the signal is picking up.

Sanjay tells me Tom Cruise is his favorite American actor. “I watch all Tom Cruise movies. One day I want to… go to Hollywood. I want to be an actor.”

Sanjay would fit right in to LA culture. He’s good looking, strong, and just confident enough to make me immediately like him.

“You’re never going to believe this, Sanjay, but I live in Hollywood.”

He wants to know what it is like. I don’t have the heart to tell him it’s not as pretty as it looks on the big screen.

“I cannot afford to get there. I want to study acting, but there is not a single university in all of Bangladesh where you study acting. So I will study business. I will start my own business.”

“I hate knowing you won’t be able to act. I think everyone should follow their dreams. I don’t want you to give up on becoming an actor.”

“Just pray for me.”

“I will absolutely pray for you.” In a community of Hindus it will be difficult to not exclaim, “Excuse me?” when they ask you to pray to your God instead of theirs.

“Can you tell me what your favorite movie is, Sanjay?”

“Every Tom Cruise movie.”

I laugh. “You know there’s a lot of talk about his personal life in America. Some people don’t like him because of the way he behaves. What do you think about that?”

“I don’t much care about… personal life. I did hear he separated from his daughter. I just like his movies. He’s got a good face. Good hair.” He says he also listens to American singers and wants to know my favorite band.

“Jimmy Eat World.”

“Jimmy? Eat? World? I don’t know them.”

“I didn’t think you would. I don’t think it’s your style, Sanjay. So there are no acting classes or universities in Bangladesh? What about India? Have you considered going over to India and acting in Bollywood films?”

“Shahrukh Khan is my favorite actor. He is my role model. I definitely think I have a shot in Bollywood.”

“Him and Tom Cruise.”

“Of course. Of course.”

Khan is often referred to in the media as the “King Kahn.” He is the “King of Romance” and the “King of Bollywood,” having acted in over 75 films and is currently the most nominated actor in Bollywood of all time.

I want to know what Sanjay needs to get to India so he can pursue acting over there.

“It’s all about money, you know? My parents could not afford. We live here in this community. We want to do other things, but we cannot afford to make our dreams come true.”

This community is a series of narrow alleyways and apartments stacked upon apartments, clotheslines running from building to building. You must push rugs and pants and shirts out of your way as you walk. The ground is littered with trash and urine. Chickens and stray kittens and forgotten children follow you around every corner, begging for food, begging for their picture to be taken. The door to every home is open. The occupants creep outside to confirm that yes, it was a white man that just walked passed their home. The brick and mud beneath my feet is wet even though I’m told it hasn’t rained in Dhaka for months. One block over the buildings stop and open up into a cement courtyard with water pumps and potholes. Naked children sit in red buckets usually filled with Cokes and beers at American barbecues, their mothers pouring water over their heads. A small child, a girl no older than five, walks into the center and pulls her pants down. Here she urinates in the same area her neighbors bathe.

Sanjay’s parents are sweepers. The entire community started out as a community of sweepers. Brought over from India and handed a push broom to clean the impossibly muddy and waste-filled city streets of Dhaka. Even though Sanjay believes he cannot afford to make his dreams come true, his parents dream of only the best for Sanjay and their daughters. Which is why they work seven days a week to support his private coaching lessons in English, reading, and writing. He is able to afford this because of his parents involvement in what he says Food for the Hungry calls a “Savings Group.”

“Food for the Hungry came a few years ago, back when all of us had nothing.”

When Food for the Hungry enters a community, the goal is to leave within 10 years. “If you’re not leaving, you’re doing something wrong,” I was once told by a friend who travels the world working with humanitarian efforts. FH arranges child sponsorship, but they are not child-exclusive. Sponsorship ensures a child’s education which prevents young girls from getting married when they are only thirteen. FH staff walks with these people daily, teaching them how to provide for themselves. Once the community is self-sustaining, FH leaves.

I look around. Anyone in America would consider what these people currently have as “still nothing.” But their neighborhoods are full of storefronts and food and smiling children.

“But now we have much. We have each other.”

It’s as though everyone here in this place was dealt a crap hand in poker, but instead of folding they decided to put all their cards together to see if they could come up with one half-decent hand.

Savings Groups started when someone asked if people in the community could commit to sacrificing a handful of rice once a week. A handful of rice turned into one cent. One cent turned into five. And five into ten. Savings groups are now weekly gatherings of 15 to 20 women. They each collect 10 or 15 taka per week (about five cents), and place the money into a bank account opened up in their names. As their capital grows they have the opportunity to individually invest in things like livestock, opening up a shop, or investing more into their child’s education. They draw out a loan from the Savings Group account, invest, and agree to pay the loan back with a two percent interest.

And because Sanjay’s mother is involved in a savings group where they also learn literacy, law, and proper nutritional values such as vegetables have vitamins, his parents are able to help him pursue his dreams.

“They are devoted to their children continuing their studies,” Sanjay tells me, smiling. “So we don’t have to live the life they came from.”

“You have wonderful parents, Sanjay. Do you know that? I am so glad they believe in you.”

“We are very grateful to you people for sponsoring us,” Sanjay says. “I have been sponsored before.”

“But not anymore?”

“No. I don’t know how this happened. But now I passed primary school. Next I have exams. But there is no sponsor. I lost my sponsor. But it’s no problem.”

“Did it make you angry when you lost your sponsor?”

“I wish I could meet them in person one day. I want to tell them something. I want to thank them for changing my life. And my family’s. Without sponsorship, we would not be having conversation.”

“Sanjay, what is your last name. I don’t want to forget you. Perhaps someone in America will want to continue your sponsorship?”

“My last name? No. It’s okay. You won’t remember my last name. It’s okay. It’s too long.” He looks to the translator who has joined my side. The children spilling out of doorways and climbing atop each other’s shoulders to get a better look at me all laugh when Sanjay turns to them. He takes my hand, grips my shoulder, flashes a killer smile. “You can just call me Sanjay Cruise.”

Walking into their house is like stepping down into a basement. I leave my shoes behind outside. Cold feet on colder concrete. The neighborhood is a cement compound of alleyways and narrow walls. The interior of the house is no different. Outside chickens peck at our toes. Dinner is cooked over fires on the front steps. Stray dogs slathered in mud and fleas sleep on piles of wet trash. Flies follow us everywhere.

Joti, a sixteen-year-old girl living in the slums of Dhaka welcomes us into her home.

“Joti means ‘Bright,’” our translator, Mizan, informs us.

“It fits you so well,” Lauren tells her.

From outside we enter a kitchen no larger than your average bedroom closet. The doors to these homes are never shut. Neighbors walk in and out without question or invite. We are followed by a small crowd eager to be seen by our cameras, and fascinated with our presence. There is no privacy here. Joti is one of four children and seven people living in a one-room home the size of a Freshman dorm.

We are ushered to the main room (the only room) where two rusted metal chairs have been set up. We are directed to take a seat on the king-sized bed, which takes up three quarters of the room. The mattress is as hard and thin as brick.

I hesitate. What I first mistake for a pile of blankets and pillows is actually an elderly woman made of skin and bones buried beneath an orange quilt. She stirs as we sit. An old coffee tin sits inches from her lips. She coughs wet and deadly the way water sounds escaping your lungs after drowning and being brought back from the brink of the afterlife. Her fingers, the only other part of her body we will see during our time here, creep out from under her chin, pulling the tin close to her mouth to regurgitate whatever her lungs have released.

All seven of them, including the sickly woman next to me, sleep in the same stone bed each night.

Joti takes a seat in one of the chairs. Lauren is to my right. Mizan to my left. Joti’s older brother comes in with a bowl of sliced oranges and water.

We’ve been warned not to drink anything that doesn’t come from a sealed bottle, not to eat fruit that’s been washed. Hepatitis A runs rampant through the pipes. But we’ve been graciously invited into this home. To refuse would be as insulting as walking in with our shoes on. Mizan is kind enough to tell them we’ve just eaten.

“Joti wants to know about your religion,” Mizan says.

“Christian,” I say.

“We love Jesus,” Lauren corrects. The Bangladesh population is 89.5% Muslim, 9.6% Hindu. Religion is engrained into the Bangali culture. It is a cornerstone, a way of life. It would be absurd for them to assume it is any different anywhere else. Because Christianity is a Western Religion, their association of it is left in the hands of Bill Clinton and Brittany Spears.

Joti doesn’t mind. She tells us she is Hindu. She points us to the shrine made up of red statues, bathed in gold light. She asks us to take a picture.

Joti’s day starts with waking up at 6 a.m. seven days a week. She brings water to a boil and bathes her grandmother – the sick woman in bed behind me – with a hot rag. It’s the only way she can get clean. There is no bathroom in this home. Nor in any home within this community. Afterwards, Joti cleans the home, goes to school, returns, and helps her mother prepare dinner. The family ends the night in bed together. They are fortunate enough to have a small television propped up in the corner of the room. Sometimes the reception is good enough to watch a show.

Joti’s mother, Debi, arrives home from work. She does not seem surprised to see us. In fact, she appears quite excited until she discovers we do not have any water, tea, or food before us. She begins apologizing, instructing her son to run to the market.

“She wants you to have some 7UP,” Mizan says.

I try to let her know it’s okay. “We just had tea.” I touch my stomach. “Very full.”

Debi calms herself, sits. The grandmother coughs, spits. I fight the urge to look, to ask if she’s okay.

“So tired,” Debi says. As she speaks, Mizan translates. He tells us she is a “sweeper.” Bangladesh is the size of Wisconsin with a population of over 150 million and counting. That’s half the population of the United States. The streets in Dhaka are littered with debris, dust, piles of dirt and trash and unidentifiable waste. As a sweeper, Debi wakes up five a.m., seven days a week, and is paid 5000 Taka a month to sweep the same street every morning. This amounts to $62.50 a month.

Lauren asks Joti if she works. She shakes her head. Mizan says someone in America sponsors Jodi through the organization Food for the Hungry. As a result, Joti does not have to work. Instead she can focus on going to University and becoming a math teacher. “Debi,” he says, “is forever grateful for this.”

“Is there an age you are not allowed to work in Dhaka?” I ask.

“There is, but it is not respected. Children are willing to work. They are a commodity. The same with marriage. You’re not supposed to be married until you are eighteen, but it is happening. A lot.”

Lauren asks Debi what her hopes are for Joti’s future marriage.

Joti laughs. Her mother smiles, answers.

“Her dream is that her daughter finishes her education before she even thinks about marriage,” Mizan says.

Debi’s oldest daughter was married by the time she was sixteen. “She married my husband’s sister’s son.”

I pause to work this out. “She married her cousin?”

“Yes. Yes.”

Along with a young girl getting married between the ages of 13 and 18, this is also a common practice in Bangladesh. Girls like Joti are not forced to drop out of school to work or marry if they are fortunate enough to be sponsored.

Debi is so proud of what Joti is accomplishing. “Not only that,” she says, “but she is always helping out around the house, cooking, cleaning. She is so smart.”

Lauren asks if there is anything we can do for them. They are living in a generously proportioned prison cell. They know nothing of privacy. Their water isn’t clean. They share a restroom with an entire neighborhood. Joti and Debi live in a county oppressive to women who get married before they even get a shot at an education. Their needs are endless. What can we possibly do? Teach them English, fly them to America, build them a white picket fence?

When Debi answers, Mizan looks at us. “What does she want?” I ask. “She wants you to pray,” he says.

“She wants us to pray? For what?”

“Please pray for her,” Mizan says, pointing to the sick woman behind us. Her name is Roma. She is Joti’s grandmother on her father’s side. “Roma is quite old. She has many health complications.”

“Okay. Yeah. We can do that.” Debi smiles as Mizan translates. She closes her eyes. We enjoy an awkward silence.

“Wait. Pray now?”

“Yes. She wants you to pray here. Now.”

“So we are going to bow our heads, and, uh, just pray? Right here? Is that okay?” Hinduism doesn’t pray to just one God. They pray to millions. I don’t want to offend anyone by praying to the wrong God, let alone offend the wrong God.

“Yes. She wants you to pray to your Christian God.”

So we bow our heads. And we pray. We pray for a miracle. We pray for God, a physician greater than any here on Earth, to heal this stranger on a literal deathbed. We pray for his will to be done. We thank him for his endless grace and mercy. We love him. We love Joti. And Roma. And Debi. And we are floored to be Christians invited into the home of Hindus and asked to pray not to their Gods for healing, but to ours.

We pull into the garage. My wife admires the pile of shiny, mismatched objects scattered about the street corner across from our apartment.

She asks if it’s a yard sale or trash.

I shrug. I suggest a sale.

It’s raining today in L.A.

“Why would someone choose such a terrible corner to have a sale?” she wants to know. “There’s never any foot traffic over here. Who does it belong to?”

A short, older woman dressed in slippers, jacket, and a wool hat paces the corner, hands in pockets. A small dog follows her path, loyal, huddling close to her ankles whenever she stops.

It’s raining the only way it ever rains in L.A. Like a leaky faucet. The faucet’s not really on, but it won’t shut off either.

My wife crosses the street.

“Of course you’re going to check it out.” I trail behind.

The woman smiles at us. She points out picture frames, oil paintings, dancing santas, and a brand new pair of rip-off Doc Martens made by Sketchers.

“Shoe. Brand new.” She smiles. “Thirty.”

My wife holds up two necklaces. “How much?”

“I don’t speak English well,” the woman informs us. She digs into her purse and pulls out a yellow pad of paper. She writes in crooked numbers: 10$

I hand her a twenty. I ask her name.

“Flora,” she says.

“Flora. My name is Max. This is my wife, Lauren. It’s good to meet you. Where are you from?”

“Romania”

“How long have you been in America?”

She doesn’t understand. I hold my arms out wide as if I am going to give her a hug. I put my foot down and point to it. “America. How long?” I default, as one tends to do, to speaking slow and loud as if it will help her understand me better.

“Yes, yes! Over there.” She points to the building across the street from ours. I tell her I live right here, pointing to the building behind us.

“Neighbors!” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “Neighbors.”

Flora lives in Romania with her two sons. Her youngest, John, moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting and modeling. A lucky gig as a background actor in a commercial leads to other commercials and magazine ads. In two days, John is going to sign a contract with a major talent agency. He is also about to become a citizen of the United States. Then a car runs a red light at an intersection in Hollywood, and slams into the driver’s side of John’s new BMW. His car spins three times before hitting a building, and like a wicked game of human pinball, hits a tree, a telephone pole, and finally lands in a ditch on the side of the road.

Flora shows us pictures of the car. It’s an unrecognizable twisted hunk of metal. I look at John who has now joined us outside, his upper and lower extremities marvelously intact. Only God knows why he wasn’t removed from this car in pieces. John slides up the sleeves of his windbreaker, showing Lauren and I the deep vertical scars crawling up the entire length of his forearm as if a mad scientist from a horror film had crudely cut him open then carelessly stapled him back together for kicks. He has matching scars on his legs and around his neck.

“And down my back,” he says.

John spends thirty days in a coma. When he finally opens his eyes, the doctors repeatedly tell him he shouldn’t be alive. In fact, they try to talk his mother out of coming to America. “He’s not going to make it,” they say.

But as mothers tend to do when it comes to someone else suggesting what is best for their children, be it medical professionals, the law, or (God help them) another parent, Flora ignores their advice and miraculously has a visa within forty-eight hours after the accident.

“This is first miracle,” she says. Flora had been trying to find her way to America for years, but both U.S. and Romanian politics kept her abroad. “God needed me here.”

When John wakes up, two things are different: he cannot cry, nor can he remember anything after the accident.

John doesn’t know the exact reason why he no longer can cry. Perhaps he cannot remember to stay sad. Or it’s possible the extensive damage to his brain altered specific nerve endings, the ones enabling us to shed tears. What John does know is that he has anterograde amnesia. This means he cannot make new memories. Every two minutes his brain relapses to a life before the accident. He knows enough to eat each day, knows when he is full, or when he is tired. He knows to take the dog out, and recognizes his craving for nicotine. He remembers how to drive, but will forget where he is going. He won’t remember if he took a shower this morning. He can retain faces if he sees them enough, but two minutes into any conversation John will kindly ask, “Please remind me what we were talking about.” He chuckles with embarrassment while repeatedly apologizing for the inconvenience. He knows it slows everything down.

“Will you remember us if we see you tomorrow?” I ask.

John looks at Lauren and smiles. “I might remember her.” Then to me, “You, not so much.”

Flora is selling everything. After the medical bills, visas, travel, and life expenses, they are broke. John hasn’t been able to work since the accident for obvious reasons. He laughs, smiles, and speaks English very well; he’s charming and full of energy, but at any job he will remain in a perpetual state of training. The accident and his condition restarted his application process to become a citizen of the United States. This is both an exhausting and expensive process. One his family cannot afford. The government allocates them only $187 a month. They have already been evicted once, and are about to be evicted again. Their current landlord, aware of John’s unique situation, has been gracious enough to give John and Flora an extension on rent. They still owe $800 for December. On February 1st they will owe $1000 for January and so on. This is why John and Flora are sitting on the side of the road on a rainy winter day in LA in a neighborhood with little traffic, trying to sell whatever they have to keep a roof over their heads and dinner on the table.

“Where will you go if you cannot pay rent?” I ask.

“To the park,” says John.

“The park? You’re going to sleep in the park?”

He laughs. “Yes. Nowhere else to go.”

I look at Flora. She’s old. She can barely walk. She won’t last a night outside. But John, Lauren, and myself all know she will never leave her son’s side. Even if it means sleeping next to him on a park bench.

Lauren and I discuss giving them the $800 to hold off their landlord, but we both know this is only a temporary solution. They still need to come up with January’s rent. They still need to come up with a plan.

It starts with a phone call to a friend. “You’re never going to believe who we just met. A man who cannot make new memories…Yes…Exactly… Just like that guy from Memento…He was outside on our street with his mother…Selling everything to make rent…Yes…We want to help them…I don’t know…You can help too?”

Once we’ve contacted our immediate friends in Los Angeles, we tell Twitter. Then Facebook. Within a few hours we have the $800 John and Flora have spent the last two months trying to earn.

Two days later we knock on their door. John and Flora’s apartment is uncomfortable. It’s small, but that could be from the amount of boxes and belongings scattered about, piled high. The random objects from their weekly yard sales overtaking the countertops, the sofa, and bordering the perimeter.

“Our landlord is on his way over today. With the lawyer,” John says.

Flora says something in Romanian. John laughs. “With the ‘liar,’” he translates.

We show Flora and John the list of friends and strangers from around the world that want to help them out. “These people here, we told them about your situation. We know less than half of them. Some are from Romania. Some from Australia. Everywhere.”

She smiles and nods. She thinks we have come to give her groceries, a couple extra dollars. I show her the envelope filled with hundred dollar bills. “There is twenty-three hundred dollars in here.”

Flora begins to cry.

“This isn’t just from us. We didn’t do this,” I tell her. “God did. These people did.”

Flora continues to speak in Romanian. John keeps telling us how amazing we are.

Flora uses her son to translate for us. “You are angels,” she says, John says.

“We aren’t angels,” Lauren says. “It’s all the people on this list who are the angels.”

John’s upper lip quivers. His eyes look wet. “I can’t cry,” he thinks he’s telling me for the first time. “Because of my accident. I can’t cry. But I have tears in my eyes. I have tears in my eyes. Can you believe it? I have tears. We are so happy. The landlord is coming over soon to kick us out.”

Flora hasn’t stopped talking. John wipes at his eyes. “She says she is going to pray for every person on this list. Day and night. Every single say. And her priest in Romania. He is going to pray too. She wants everyone on this list to know that God is going to give them one hundred times more in return for what they did here today.”

Flora hugs the list of names like they are her own children. She clutches the tiny piece of paper close to her chest, her eyes shut tight, shaking her head, a smile on her face. She says, “God through us works.” She kisses each of us on the cheek. She’s on the tips of her toes and I still have to bend down so she can reach my face.

She points to her ears, her fingers, her neck. “I had to sell everything. All my gold from Russia.”

Flora loves Romania. Her husband is back home where he owns a farm. “Things are easier there,” she says. But Flora refuses to leave America until she knows her son is okay.

“The treasure is not here on earth,” she says. “it is in heaven.

With one tweet we collected John and Flora’s rent money through donations from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers. Today I learned not only are John and Flora my neighbors, but every single individual who gave without question, donated groceries, and prayed relentlessly. You are my neighbor. And I am yours.

Dressed in a faded, wool top hat and crocs, Mac Nolte drags a shopping cart with crooked wheels across uneven Hollywood roads. The cans and bottles he’s spent the night collecting bang and rattle over the gravel and against the cart’s wire frame.

The sun is nearly useless this time of year in southern California. There is no refuge from the cold once it sets. Walking home, Mac and I pass each other on the sidewalk. He turns, smiles.

I nod and understand that while I am done for the day, Mac’s work is far from over. It’s not uncommon in Los Angeles to see shopping carts piled high with cans, bottles, and bags, all headed to the local recycling center for change on the pound.

“Are you hungry?” I ask.

“Yeah. Yeah I am. How’d you know?”

“Anyone digging through the trash for bottles at 9 pm on a winter night in LA probably isn’t trying to save the planet.”

I get Mac a turkey sandwich, some string cheese, and a Snickers.

He thanks me, tells me I’ve made his night.

“Well, my name is Max. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

“Max? No shit. My name is Mac. Max and Mac.”

“We could be partners in crime,” I say. I ask Mac where he is headed. Tonight, we’re going the same direction.

Mac arrived in Los Angeles thirty-seven years ago, and made a name for himself as an entertainment photographer. He grew up in Mississippi where he says he learned to survive. “It was a time where if you looked at a white girl, you were hung. And to all the white people you said, ‘Ya’Sir.’” Mac was born an artist. He knew he wanted to be a photographer from a very early age, but his family was poor. If he wanted to go to school, he was going to have to pay for it all on his own.

As soon as Mac was old enough, he left Mississippi for Baton Rouge, Louisiana to work on a cherry farm. While there, he enrolled in an all black school. “After I jumped on the cherry farm bus, I worked for the Jolly Green Giant. You know the Jolly Green Giant. They do corn and peas.”

But Mac didn’t want to put corn and peas in a can for the rest of his life. He wanted to go to art school. So he hitched his way to Milwaukee. “I had a cousin there who put me up. At my school in Baton Rouge, I had a teacher in the ninth and tenth grade that encouraged me to never give up on my dream to be a photographer. So I stayed in Milwaukee with my cousin and worked all day, every day, until I finally had enough money for college.”

After graduation, Mac hitched his way to Los Angeles.

“One guy that helped me in the photo world was Lester Sloan. He was the only black photographer working for Newsweek magazine.”

Sloan was hired by Newsweek’s Los Angeles bureau in 1970. In 1975 he was awarded a Niemen Fellowship to study at Harvard University. After completing his studies at Harvard, Sloan returned to LA and worked as a photographer until 1996. Today he is a visiting professor of photojournalism at Savannah State University and contributing essayist to NPR’s Weekend Edition.

“Man, you were trained by the best.”

“That’s right. I just met a lot of people. I was with a guy, this particular guy, this guy was struggling and starving. This was Johnny Depp. Do you know Johnny Depp? I used to shoot the band Rock City Angeles. This was when Johnny Depp wanted to be a musician at that time before he landed a role on, on, on that show. That show 21 Jump Street. You see he met Nick Cave, and Nick Cave sent him to his agent and the agent signed him, and, well, the rest with Mr. Depp is history.”

When we arrive at my house, I ask Mac where he is sleeping tonight.

“I have a studio up on Wilcox.”

“Like an apartment?”

“Like an office. I can’t afford a real apartment so I sleep where I work. I don’t have a bed though. I don’t want anyone to know that I live there.” Mac tells me he sleeps on a mat. “You just roll it up and you got space.”

“Isn’t the uncomfortable? You might as well be sleeping on the floor.”

“Oh man, nawww, it’s okay. I’ve been doing this for twenty years now. I took Judo all throughout my life, and the key thing there is that your mat means a lot. So when I sleep, I sleep on that, then I roll it up and file it away. No need for a bed. Bed takes up too much space.”

“You’re out here recycling. Why are you collecting cans?”

“Well, I need extra cash. I’m trying to take a class at Pasadena City College. And that’s two credits. And that’s about $120, you see? I signed up. But I only got three days to pay. So. I’m trying to get $120 in three days. It’s a poster and silk-screening class. I want to start silk-screening.”

“Is that what you do at your shop?”

“Yeah. I make t-shirts and sell photography. I put stuff in the window. Occasionally, I have a yard sale. I can’t afford a city permit to sell. I live in a storefront. It’s all I can afford to rent. But I want to get better at making shirts. I can’t get better unless I take this class. And to take this class, I need exactly one hundred and twenty dollars.”

“How much do these cans go for?”

“Well last night I cashed in and made fifty-three bucks. I’m gonna run this here cart till about one a.m. this evening. Then I will do a yard sale of my shirts and prints and hustle up that money so I can take this class.”

“Mac, what if I could give you that money?”

Mac looks at me like he’s just realized he’s made a terrible mistake. Like he shouldn’t be speaking with me at all.

“Mac?”

“Are you serious?”

“I am.”

“Maaaannnn. You would be like a mother fucking dream!”

Mac asks what I do for a living. He wants to know how I can afford to give him such an enormous sum of money. I tell him I know it isn’t much. I wish I could give him more, but I don’t have a lot. I just can’t stand to see someone digging through the trash to pay their bills. “I’m just a writer.”

“A writer!? Oh man. I can’t believe it. I respect writers to the top. TO THE TOP. You are coming up with something that never existed. Come on, man. It’s not there. But you see it. And you make it real. A good artist makes things tangible. Man. I respect you.”

Mac says he used to be friends with a writer named Marilyn Ferguson. An author most recognized for her work The Aquarin Conspiracy. I decide to believe Mac’s stories about Johnny Depp and Lester Sloan. If you’re trying to drop celebrity names, why on earth would you tell me you were friends with such an obscure writer? I have no idea who Marilyn Ferguson is until I look her up later that evening. Mac and Marilyn met when he was getting ready to move eight years ago. Divorced and with an estranged son, Mac held a yard sale. Marilyn stopped by, asked is he was moving, and told him she had a small place she was trying to rent. He ought to come by and check it out.

Mac lived in her place until 2008 when she died of a heart attack. He lost a best friend. Without knowing where to turn or what to do next, Mac now sleeps in a storefront window in Hollywood on a Judo mat.

“What about your ex wife or son? Could you ever reach out to them.”

“Man. This is America. You’re alone here. My son, though, he is a computer expert and a policeman.” Mac pauses, looks down. “I don’t talk to him much. Maybe every two or three months.”

“That’s okay, Mac. Sometimes I go a month or two without talking to my dad too.”

“Yeah. I guess that’s just the way of things between fathers and sons.”

When Mac and I part ways, him needing to finish the night’s work and my needing to rest before the next day’s work begins, I hand my new friend the money for his class. I tell him to use it for whatever he needs. Food. Beer. Rent. But he insists on telling me the money is going right to that class. He thanks me, says I am an angel and it’s been an honor to meet me. He wants to hang out again, and asks me to stop by the shop sometime so he can give me a couple of t-shirts.